So you're playing starcraft, everything's going fine, load up a 3v3 with your friends. You've built up quite a large army, and are ready to attack, all of a sudden, the screen goes black with some green artifacts, your sound loops buzzes, hiss'es.. etc, and you realize, Your PC has just froze! AHHHHHHH!

This appears to come randomly, you can be building a psylon, or a Nexus, and then BAM!!

Well, this was what was happening to me randomly all during beta, and even in the retail now apparently. But there IS a Fix.

(Only for the ones who have to reset the PC after crash, or it auto-reboots. The ones who crash back to desktop have a different issue, and this won't resolve it. )*Just note, I will not be responsible if you mess something up, but this requires Windows Registry Tweaks, so please make sure you are familiar before attempting.*

The reason/issue:This is crashing is because Windows Vista/7 have the stupid "TDR" built into the OS set at 2 seconds, and it does it kinda poorly in my opinion.

In plain english:Windows Vista/7 checks/polls your video card every so often, to make sure it hasn't "crashed", kind of like a "ping" to the card. Normally, the graphics driver/card responds right away.Well what happens is, when you are running SCII and some other Graphics Intensive Games, your graphics card is busy processing the game commands and renders, so it may not respond to windows within 2 seconds. This is the part that crashes the game, as per Windows Default, when the 2 second Timeout Detect Period passed, Windows kicks in the Graphics/GPU/VPU recovery process. (Shuts off and restarts the Video card, and drivers.)So at this point SCII just lost the device it was sending all the graphics rendering commands to. Hence the black screen with the lines/ looping sound, etc.

The Fix:We will raise the TDR timeout period to 10 seconds. (this should be sufficient, don't go any higher as it may be bad for your video card IF an actual issue does arise.)1. Open Registry Editior (regedit.exe)2. Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers"3. Create a new 32_BIT DWORD Key, and name it "TdrDelay" (case-sensitive) and assign it a Decimal Value of "10". (If one already exists, just change the value from 2 to 10)

Or Copy the following into notepad, and save as a .reg file. (Easy Way) Then Import the settings.

o.O I have an NVidia card here, does that matter? The games I play sometimes get stuck all of a sudden, but I can still use other applications that are open (if I wasn't playing fullscreen) and my music does keep on running like it should (that's a radio streaming actually).., but anyway the game hangs (doesn't respond) and I have to do a hard reboot.Would that be the same issue? I suppose not..

o.O I have an NVidia card here, does that matter? The games I play sometimes get stuck all of a sudden, but I can still use other applications that are open (if I wasn't playing fullscreen) and my music does keep on running like it should (that's a radio streaming actually).., but anyway the game hangs (doesn't respond) and I have to do a hard reboot.Would that be the same issue? I suppose not..

[EDIT] nvm.. I just saw that the delay is set to 60 already... -.-

Different issue, but interesting that Delay is preset @ 60, I assume certain cards manufacturers tweak that value as well.